So how many arguments and conversations have you had about that Spur video?
Sometimes our conversations can get almost as rof as the incident itself.
It seems everybody has an opinion about what had happened.
Should that woman have used such provocative language?
Is the guy a generally abusive man who loses his cool like that all the time?
Was it a racist confrontation?
What would have happened if it was a black man who spoke to a white woman and her kids like that?
Should he have sent his wife to deal with the other woman?
What would we have done if we were in the woman’s shoes?
Would he still be in hospital, right, or would his funeral have been on Saturday?
On and on it goes.
These are all fine questions to be asking, but allow me three slightly different observations.
The first is my view that adults should never get involved in children’s arguments.
Of course there are exceptions, but as a rule, I never fight my kids’ battles.
I rather teach my kids how to deal with certain situations themselves.
Besides, children generally get along just fine, if you just leave them to their own devices.
If you watch them play, you’ll see one moment they are fighting and the next they are sharing dirty sweets picked up from the floor.
We can learn a lot from how short their memories are when it comes to holding grudges.
So when we step in, we either make it worse than it could’ve been, or we end up the bad guy, as they kiss and make up minutes later.
All you have to do is remember your own childhood.
One moment you’d be mad as hell at someone, but then tomorrow you guys would be playing together again.
And any adult that intervened in that time, would be left looking like a fool.
Most people seem to have missed the bigger pictures, though. This one is a fundamental gender question and how we are hardwired by our hormones.
Why is it OK for a man to be violent when he's protecting his family and turf, but not under other circumstances?
And a female friend of mine wants to know if women sometimes hide behind the fact that they are women, while verbally abusing men, who are not expected to resort to their basic hormonal instinct.
But society doesn’t expect self-control from men as much as it expects to dictate to a man’s testosterone when it should or shouldn’t take control.
It’s the same as instructing a woman not to become emotional and overdose on chocolate during her monthlies.
We are actually not instructing her. Because she has no control; we are, in fact, instructing her hormones to stop being irrational.
While you think about that, allow me to make a suggestion that deserves some serious consideration from the world’s political leaders.
We should be teaching our school-going children practical subjects at primary school.
How about Conflict Management, Effective Communication, Verbally Diffusing a Volatile Situation, Resolving Confrontation and Winning over Explosive People?
These are all practical subjects – tools that could make our society better, more tolerant and peaceful.
Instead we are taught how to lose our tempers, be confrontational and violent.
Most of us would have tackled that man in much the same way and many of us would like to believe that we would have donnered him.
Very few of us consider about how we may diffused the situation by talking to him calmly.
For South Africans, this is counter intuitive, but it shouldn’t be.
If we want these skills, we are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to leadership communication experts to teach us these things as adults.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our kids grew up with these skills from a young age? Imagine if that man or woman in the Spur video had those abilities.
The incident may have ended in them sitting at the same table, eating together and having a conversation and maybe even becoming friends.
Instead, they both taught their kids exactly how not to deal with confrontation. Which means there’s another Spur video waiting to happen to the next generation.
And on and on we go!